Travel Breaks: A Time And A Place

I thought I escaped mid-morning water cooler chats when I flipped the bird to my last big corporate job, but boy I was wrong. Apparently the water cooler talk that inspires two-for-one margarita hour across the US also travels outside of its borders.

Don’t get me wrong here; I think there is value in the occasional small talk. I understand that sometimes you have to make sure that you are indeed still capable of making the pipes vibrate. I also understand that my habit of having conversations with myself into my iPhone in “selfie mode” probably isn’t something I should admit in a blog post. Seeing as I just did that though, I’ll go ahead and say that yes, I do indeed like talking to people when I’m traveling. In fact it is one of the reasons that I travel, to meet new people from all over the world whether traveler or local in my current foreign locale. What really caught me off guard though is that monotonous tape recorded conversations of my corporate yesteryear constantly show their coffee stained, “you wanna go to Subway for lunch again?” faces in every place I wander.

To be sure, things have changed drastically for me though now as my water cooler chats (yeah they are still around the water cooler you can’t drink the tap water in most parts of the world) have taken a different shape. I’ve just replaced the spoiling of the most recent “Game of Thrones” episode with divulging the highlights of the expensive tour the asshole that kept me up all night blasting trance music just booked. What can I say? Passive aggressiveness travels too.

Brushing cynicism aside yet again, most of the conversations I have on the road I wouldn’t change for the world. Even if they follow the exact (EXACT) same script:

“Where are you from?”

“The United States. South Carolina, do you know it?”

“How long have you been traveling?”

“About four months on this trip”

“When are you going home?”

“I don’t know I’m working and traveling and I really don’t have any plans.”

“WHAT!?! That’s awesome!!!”

“Yeah sometimes, but sometimes I’d like to have a place to stop and call home for a while.”

“Oh man, I just can’t believe that you get to live like that! I’m going to run out of money in [insert number of weeks/months]…”

The exchange of overt (and unwarranted) envy and me explaining “it really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be” goes on for another few minutes before I can finally change the subject. Eventually we move on and the conversation matures from the scripted stage (We actually start interacting!). Lately though what has been sticking with me the most is my scripted answer to one of the questions above:

“Yeah sometimes, but sometimes I’d like to have a place to stop and call home for a while.”

In fact as I continue lumbering down this path of perpetual movement, this sentiment is starting to become less of a scripted statement and more of something I actually believe. Now before you, dear reader (who is probably located within 25 miles of the house I grew up in), scream “come home,” let me elaborate a bit on this point.

First the timing:

Just because you are a perpetual traveler doesn’t mean that you have to travel all the time. I meet people all the time who are “on month one of my fourteen month man, so pumped!”. That is month one of their around the world trip with major flights booked and plans pretty much set for the whole damn trip. I can’t help but feel sorry for them though because I truly don’t think I can do that. You never really know when travel is going to be too much, when you just need a break. I felt trapped just a few months ago when I was stuck in a place for ten more days because a holiday forced me to pre-book a room!

Is there a perfect mix of travel and, well, ‘not travel’? My search for that answer will probably never end but my current one is this:

I think the appropriate mix for me (this is a very personal thing) is about four months of travel for every two months of ‘not travel’. This is relatively fluid though and certainly not hard and fast. The one rule that I’m absolutely going to live by though is that for every month I have been traveling I need to want to stop for that many days before I actually do stop. For example, last week I wanted to take a travel break on Monday. Since I’ve been traveling about four months I said ‘if you still want to stop on Thursday, then stop.’ By Tuesday afternoon I had the travel bug all over again and I haven’t looked back since.

Now that I’ve got the timing portion of the equation sorted into a nice ‘mathemotional equation’ (trademark Snik’s Travels), I can move on to the much less quantitative part of the problem; what do I consider a non-travel break?

To me mixing travel with ‘not travel’ doesn’t mean going ‘home’. Is going back to where my friends and family live, where I was born and raised, an option for that break? Absolutely and it’s high up on the list. It isn’t the only place on the list though. For me ‘home’ is somewhere that I can temporarily setup a life. Somewhere that I can have friends that I can skip the small talk with. Somewhere that the lady at the lunch place down the street will remember exactly how I like my sandwich and will laugh when I sit at the same table everyday. Somewhere that I can comfortably lay around on the weekend and not do a damn thing. Somewhere I can get work done and not feel guilty about not ‘traveling.’ That, to me, is a home.

As simple as that sounds I haven’t found one of those yet on my current trip through Southern Mexico and Central America. I have found places that I’ve wanted to linger a bit longer than the others but none that I have really wanted to plant temporary roots in. For that I’ll keep searching, keep moving and most importantly, stay huddled around the water cooler.

Thanks for the comment Nick! It definitely can’t be all travel all the time. There is something in us that craves routine every now and then. Plus the best part is once you realize you are in a routine your travel urges tend to fire back up stronger than before.